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Anthropologie opening soon, downtown parking still a concern

Anthropologie is planning a Black Friday opening for the new store on Franklin Square. The space at the corner of Montgomery and Congress streets has been vacant since 606 East Café moved out over a decade ago.

That is a promising development for downtown’s holiday shopping season.

Anthropologie will lure shoppers who might otherwise spend their money in other parts of town. While they are downtown, those consumers will check out other chains — like the new Kate Spade and Free People locations on Broughton — and will also discover locally owned shops and boutiques that don’t have high name recognition or hefty advertising budgets.

And this is the point in the column where I imagine many readers will begin complaining about the existing problems with parking downtown.

I don’t doubt that Anthropologie and some other stores will do big business over the holidays, but they’d do a lot more if fewer metro area residents were worried about parking.

To a degree, the concerns about lack of downtown parking are based on perception more than reality. There are almost always spaces in downtown garages and on the street just a few minutes’ walk from prime shopping areas.

For example, on weekdays one can typically find dozens of on-street parking spaces in the Barnard Street corridor south of Oglethorpe Avenue.

But many of those metered spaces have two hour limits, which isn’t long enough for serious shopping trips.

In some sections of downtown, the limits on meters are intended to prevent SCAD students from taking up all the prime spots, but SCAD’s fall session finishes before Thanksgiving.

Presumably, the city will again loosen restrictions on some days during the holiday season, but the irregularity of the practice makes it hard for word to spread.

Of course, the public garages generally have available space, but, for a variety of reasons, many locals just don’t want to use those.

There are problems with transit too. Many who could ride CAT buses simply don’t. Many would-be shoppers live in areas with no CAT service.

And many perfectly good parking spaces have been declared off limits. I’ve written off and on for years about the security measures that eliminated dozens of on-street spaces near the federal buildings on Wright and Telfair squares.

Studies on the value of parking spaces vary, but it’s clear that the removal of those spaces has cost downtown retailers many millions of dollars in business over the years.

In a future column, I’ll revisit some of the ways we could address downtown parking concerns.